How Many American Spies Have to Die Before We Do Something Here?

This week, CNN reported a shocking story: federal agencies are investigating whether a hostile foreign intelligence service is staging microwave energy attacks on U.S. government officials in and around the nation’s capital. One incident occurred in late 2019, when a White House staffer who was walking her dog in Arlington, Virginia, a close-in suburb of Washington, DC, suffered an apparent microwave attack (she had previously been attacked in a similar fashion while on a trip to London a few months before).

More shocking still was an apparent microwave attack on a National Security Council staffer last November on the Ellipse, the oval lawn on the south side of the White House. The 2019 and 2020 incidents in and around the nation’s capital resemble other suspected microwave attacks on State Department, Pentagon, and CIA personnel in several countries in recent years. These are commonly called the “Havana syndrome” since diplomats getting sick while assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Cuba got the media’s attention. Starting in 2016, more than two dozen Americans serving at Embassy Havana fell ill with mysterious symptoms stemming from what appeared to be microwave attacks. Canadian diplomats fell ill with identical symptoms. The attacks effectively shut down the American and Canadian embassies in Cuba. A recent assessment by the National Academy of Sciences, conducted at State Department request, concluded that the “Havana syndrome” is likely caused by directed, pulsed radio frequency energy.

It’s been happening in many places beyond Cuba too. Our consulate in Guangzhou, the biggest U.S. consulate in China, got hit hard by mysterious microwave attacks in the first half of 2018, with several diplomats requiring medical evacuation, reporting identical symptoms to what befell Americans in Havana. The attacks kept spreading around the world. Intelligence Community personnel were falling ill in several countries in 2018-19, including Poland, Georgia, Taiwan, and Australia. Some of the attacks were conducted against very senior CIA officials. This appeared to be a targeted campaign to take down American spies.

The case of Marc Polymeropoulos is noteworthy. A veteran CIA senior operations officer,  Polymeropoulos fell ill with the now-usual symptoms while on a business trip to Moscow in December 2017. He got so sick, suffering crippling headaches, that he had to eventually take early retirement at age 50, well before he planned to leave the agency. Although Polymeropoulos had spent most of his intelligence career working counterterrorism in the Middle East, including dangerous paramilitary operations in warzones, like many CIA personnel he got shifted onto the Russia issue after 2016 and Kremlin interference in our election. Many of the personnel getting hit by microwave attacks around the world, like Polymeropoulos, were working the Russian problem.

Counterintelligence hands looked into the matter and discovered that Russian spies had been lurking in close proximity to several of the suddenly sick Americans. Whatever this exact microwave weapon being employed is, the user must get close to the target for it to be effective. The Russians were. In two cases, operatives from the Federal Security Service, the FSB, were identified as staying at the same hotels as Americans at the time they fell ill. The IC privately concluded that the Kremlin was behind the microwave attacks, and presumably they were the ones doing it in Cuba and China too. CIA had been concerned about Russian spies using microwave weapons against Americans as far back as the 1960s: this was not a new problem.

Neither did American spies start falling ill with the “Havana syndrome” in 2016. The first suspected case tracks back 20 years earlier. That was when two NSA spies serving overseas fell ill with symptoms that would later become all too familiar. Back in 1996, Mike Beck and Chuck Gubete, NSA counterintelligence officers, visited an unnamed country for a week, doing security work. They were subjected to what an NSA investigation later concluded was a “covert microwave attack.” Gubete subsequently came down with Parkinson’s disease and died in 2013, at age 61, of causes that NSA insiders believe stemmed from the secret assault he endured back in 1996.

Mike Beck was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a decade after that fateful trip, at the age of 46. The onset of Parkinson’s before age 50 is rare and Beck believes his increasingly debilitating illness was caused by that covert microwave attack. The disease upended Beck’s life, cutting his NSA career short, while killing him slowly and painfully. NSA’s conduct towards Beck has been disgraceful. His efforts to obtain workmen’s compensation from the Labor Department, on grounds that his illness was incurred on the job, were stymied by NSA, which effectively prevented Beck from getting financial help.

Beck is a patriot and a loyal intelligence officer who suffered in silence for years, only speaking to the media about his case, in guarded terms, when NSA continued to resist his claim with the Labor Department. In 2019, Beck told CBS that the incident in 1996 that made himself and Gubete sick occurred in neither Cuba nor China. NSA in 2014 described the mystery device as a “high-powered microwave system weapon that may have the ability to weaken, intimidate, or kill an enemy over time without leaving evidence…this weapon is designed to bathe a target's living quarters in microwaves.” That is what Beck believes targeted him and his deceased colleague. Many NSA personnel, current and former, agree with that assessment.

I’m one of them. I know Mike Beck. We were colleagues in NSA’s Counterintelligence Division two decades ago, before he fell ill. He is an honest and decent man. He speaks the truth, and he is maintaining his secrecy oath as he dies a slow and painful death, even as NSA has returned his loyalty with ingratitude, even betrayal. He is not naming where the incident happened because it might divulge the existence of a compartmented Top Secret IC program that was already compromised by Edward Snowden and his media enablers anyway. The least NSA can do is ask the Labor Department to give Mike Beck workmen’s compensation. He earned it, and more.

Of course, this isn’t just about one dying man. Beck was the canary in the coalmine for this disturbing issue, and the IC ignored him and his case. Presumably, NSA is worried about others who have been disabled by a covert microwave weapon asking for money. How many victims are out there, across U.S. government agencies, is an open and important question. Yet if the Russians are now employing such a weapon around our nation’s capital, targeting federal officials practically on the White House lawn, we have a serious problem on our hands. Perhaps, if NSA and our government had listened to Mike Beck years ago, Americans might not be getting attacked now, at home and abroad.